Huevos de Oro (Bigas Luna, 1993)

I am a pretty big Javier Bardem fan, especially when he's in comedies (Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango is Bardem at his most hilarious). I rented Huevos de Oro expecting a comedy, but instead got an occasionally funny, mostly melodramatic and overwrought story of a man who puts success before anything else in his life. The story revolves around Bardem's character Benito, who has big dreams of getting out of his small town and becoming a construction mogul. After his serious girlfriend cheats on him, he goes to Madrid and achieves that dream, only after using his mistress to seduce possible investors and eventually marrying the banker's daughter to ensure funding for the Gonzalez tower (complete with strip club!). The two women (Maria de Medeiros of Pulp Fiction and Maribel Verdu of Y Tu Mama Tambien) eventually meet up and become close, but what could have been an interesting turn (a three-way relationship?) is dashed in a melodramatic car accident. After the accident, Benito becomes an invalid who realizes that his whole life has been devoted to numbers (money and even the weights of the women he is with) instead of people. Gag. Bardem gives a good performance as Benito, who could have been a great antihero. He's a guy without morals, who uses everyone and everything in his path to achieve his own greatness. He's not above the most petty revenge, as he shows when his first love shows up to ask for money. But Bigas Luna, who directed and also co-wrote the film, makes a turn to sloppy, sentimental moralism that doesn't work for the character or the story. Luna could have made his same point without the cliched fall from grace, but he takes the obvious route. And then there are all the ridiculous phallic/building visual metaphors. At times, I wanted to scream, as they were so obvious and not particularly necessary. But even with all these flaws, a good Javier Bardem performance is worth seeing, so I recommend this to his fans and his fans alone. 5/10

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